Generally, audio and/or video conferencing is a tool for communication and collaboration between multiple (typically 3 or more) participants at different locations. Further, audio and/or video conferencing facilitates audio and/or video communication between geographically distributed teams in global organizations and helps improve productivity and reduce costs for the global organizations.
Existing audio and/or video conferencing system includes a plurality of endpoints and a dedicated bridge (e.g., a multipoint control unit (MCU)) connected to the endpoints. Exemplary endpoints include any terminals capable of video and/or audio communication including desktop video phones, mobile or cell phones, video conferencing units and the like. In the existing audio and/or video conferencing system, participants use the endpoints to call into a common number or an address that is assigned to the dedicated bridge. The dedicated bridge may then enable bridging of audio and/or video streams coming from the endpoints for conferencing the participants. Thus, the conferencing between the participants is dependent on the availability of the dedicated bridge. This may limit the ability to conference with multiple people as and when required. Also, the number of participants in the conferencing may depend on audio/video processing capacity of the dedicated bridge.
In another existing audio and/or videoconferencing system, one of the endpoints participating in the conference can act as a bridge. In this conferencing system, the endpoints that want to communicate among themselves, call into or are called by, the endpoint capable of acting as the bridge. Further, the endpoint acting as the bridge receives audio and/or video streams from the connected endpoints, but may decode the video stream of an active participant and sends back the processed stream to all the participants. Furthermore, the endpoint acting as the bridge mixes audio streams, such that each participant receives audio streams of all participants except its own. However, a number of participants that can be supported by the endpoint acting as the bridge may be limited by audio processing capabilities of the bridge. In other words, the number of participants that can be supported by the endpoint acting as the bridge may be limited by a number of audio decodes the endpoint acting as the bridge can perform.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.